Alright.
Rich wrote:I can't think of a single leading Nazi who came from the banking/ financial industry.
It is simplistic to say that fascism comes directly from the bourgeoisie. Their most preferred system is parliamentary. Most Stalinists (including Stalin) gave up on the ridiculous Third Period nonsense that they had been using and changed to Trotsky's analysis of fascism, even if he didn't get credit. As such, he's going to be posted here a little bit to tie up some of the loose ends a little bit. t hope that it makes sense.
But to begin with, we should define a problem that both the fascists and communists encountered with bourgeoisie systems. A quote from Engels that I think is rather under-rated:
Engels wrote:Trade had outgrown such low means of making money; they were not worth while practising for the manufacturing millionaire, and served merely to keep alive the competition of smaller traders, thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could. Thus the truck system was suppressed, the Ten Hours’ Bill [2] was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced — much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in his competition with his less favoured brother. Moreover, the larger the concern, and with it the number of hands, the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones, which taught them to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions, and finally even to discover in strikes — at opportune times — a powerful means to serve their own ends. The largest manufacturers, formerly the leaders of the war against the working-class, were now the foremost to preach peace and harmony. And for a very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, for whom the niggardly extra extortions of former years had lost all importance and had become actual nuisances; and to crush all the quicker and all the safer their smaller competitors, who could not make both ends meet without such perquisites. Thus the development of production on the basis of the capitalistic system has of itself sufficed — at least in the leading industries, for in the more unimportant branches this is far from being the case — to do away with all those minor grievances which aggravated the workman’s fate during its earlier stages. And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself.
In the case of many countries this happens later. The prototypical example, Germany, had this happen later, in the build up for WWI. So the petite bourgeois people, the "middle classes" lost their independence. Whereas Britain was able to keep moving outward, the defeat of Germany in WWI stifled further trade that Germany was now reliant upon. Here was the time that the German proletariat should have struck. And they did. But, for various reasons, they failed to succeed.
So these middle classes are hurting as much as the workers. A couple of unique things happen in Germany at the time and place. For one, there's still a bit of a peasantry that's now also in trouble. For two, the petite bourgeois and their ilk don't melt in to the proletariat as much as the proletariat fall in to particularly drastic unemployment. Third, and perhaps most important, you had a lot of these same people who had served in the military. There was a lingering respect for the authority - which may be over emphasized - but also a certain level of dehumanization and a demand to have fought for something that led to a general belief in parliamentary democracy to collapse amongst all the affected classes. The Nazis were a group that could appeal to a lot of these people. Naturally these things differ from place to place—the lingering respect for national tradition might substitute for militaristic authority in a place like Britain or the United States. Catholic tradition in Spain, though they had their own military issues. So on and so forth.
Rei wrote:Their stance toward the Third Position is to criticise us as being national chauvinists or regional chauvinists who want to create a dictatorship of the petty-bourgeoisie. From there, they then segue into talking about the 'danger' of that position, which, according to them, is that since we want to make sure that we are in charge to continue to lead the proletarians, we are compelled by circumstances to engage in 'zig-zagging', and managerial compromises, which has a potential to expose the regimes to being undermined.
This isn't a terrible summing up, but as per the nature of such discussions, there are some details that are probably important to go over.
In the basic theory, there's a deliberate parallel to both
Bonapartism and a deliberate attempt to place the
petite bourgeoisie in to historical context, including their role within the Jacobins.
Rei wrote:Of course, to me, the Communist position sounds like madness in practice, since in one breath they are criticising us for holding a position that results in zig-zagging and 3D chess, but then in the next breath they are asking the workers to take the time to wait for American workers to become communists.
American workers are the least likely people on the entire planet to become communist. How does that plan work?
The Third Position can defend itself from this criticism simply by pointing out that the United States is not going to enter any kind of federation with people that they actually hate and despise.
I wouldn't say that this is a standard communist position. Generally, the idea would be to keep the "weak-link of capitalism," is going to have to snap, which is not the United States. It must be a global movement. Which isn't so unimaginable as it was even a few decades ago.
But I might go further and say that a large part of the problem with the American working class is that they are drawn to oppose the establishment of large-scale capital. They want to return to a time before Engels quoted the above. The Republican Party tells its uninsured members living in trailer parks without jobs that it's the fault of the Democrats and their big government manipulating trade and taxes and giving hard-earned money to negros in the cities where it's squandered on Hollywood propaganda. The Democrats tell their demoralized former-unionized employees on food stamps that everything would be okay if they could just get the big bad capitalists at the top to share a little bit more and pay better. It's the same argument appealing to the same problem Engels articulated more than a century ago. It's slide-of-hand to try and hide capitalist reality from the fictional dream it promises.
To use Germany as the prototypical example again, while some of the proletariat may have wanted a socialist system - many were drawn to the blustering of the Nazis—like the middle classes. In part because the big bourgeois elements, the same elements that Americans tend to want to try and curtail by voting for their parties, opposed the fascists in Germany. The big bourgeois would have naturally preferred a system more like the US has now. When the 1918 election came up, however, the remaining democrats and socialists voted in social-democrats. Actually, not that dissimilar from a Republican expecting the Republican Party to curtail the big bourgeois elitist latte-drinking Hollywood-limoisine-Liberal or the Democrat might hope the Democratic Party would curtail the big business Wall Street fat cat asshole. The results are similar enough to guess upon:
Trotsky wrote:But the party that stood at the head of the proletariat returned the power to the bourgeoisie. In this sense the Social Democracy opened the era of counter-revolution before the revolution could bring its work to completion. However, so long as the bourgeoisie depended upon the Social Democracy, and consequently upon the workers, the regime retained elements of compromise. All the same, the international and the internal situation of German capitalism left no more room for concessions. As Social Democracy saved the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate the bourgeoisie from the Social Democracy. Hitler’s coup is only the final link in the chain of counterrevolutionary shifts.
The US, as noted, has long since accepted trade and whatnot as a reality (as per the Engels link) and is far more stable (in that it doesn't have a peasantry and whatnot and never really has) than Germany. But in Germany, this, is where the big bourgeois elements get on board with the Third Positionists. As Trotsky noted previously:
Trotsky wrote:The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled. The sober circles of bourgeois society have followed with misgivings the work of the dentist Pilsudski, but in the last analysis they have become reconciled to the inevitable, though with threats, with horse-trades and all sorts of bargaining. Thus the petty bourgeoisie's idol of yesterday becomes transformed into the gendarme of capital.
However, fascism was just an attempt to repair a system to fit in to the world that it came from. It offered a way to
overcome the initial problems of the system, not destroy it.
And here is why Dagoth Ur, correctly but without the context, explained:
Dagoth Ur wrote:Any system that perpetuates private property will revert to liberalism, ie the natural ideology of capitalism.
Trotsky wrote:Fascism in power, like Bonapartism, can only be the government of finance capital. In this social sense, it is indistinguishable not only from Bonapartism but even from parliamentary democracy. Each time, the Stalinists made this discovery all over again, forgetting that social questions resolve themselves in the domain of the political. The strength of finance capital does not reside in its ability to establish a government of any kind and at any time, according to its wish; it does not possess this faculty. Its strength resides in the fact that every non-proletarian government is forced to serve finance capital; or better yet, that finance capital possesses the possibility of substituting for each one of its systems of domination that decays, another system corresponding better to the changed conditions. However, the passage from one system to another signifies the political crisis which, with the concourse of the activity of the revolutionary proletariat may be transformed into a social danger to the bourgeoisie. The passage of parliamentary democracy to Bonapartism itself was accompanied in France by an effervescence of civil war. The perspective of the passage from Bonapartism to fascism is pregnant with infinitely more formidable disturbances and consequently also revolutionary possibilities.
And again:
Trotsky wrote:The prolonged domination of finance capital by means of reactionary social demagogy and petty-bourgeois terror is impossible. Having arrived in power, the fascist chiefs are forced to muzzle the masses who follow them by means of the state apparatus. By the same token, they lose the support of broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie. A small part of it is assimilated by the bureaucratic apparatus. Another sinks into indifference. A third, under various banners, passes into opposition. But while losing its social mass base, by resting upon the bureaucratic apparatus and oscillating between the classes, fascism is regenerated into Bonapartism. Here, too, the gradual evolution is cut into by violent and sanguinary episodes. Differing from pre-fascist or preventive Bonapartism (Giolitti, Brüning-Schleicher, Doumergue, etc.) which reflects the extremely unstable and short-lived equilibrium between the belligerent camps, Bonapartism of fascist origin (Mussolini, Hitler, etc.), which grew out of the destruction, the disillusionment and the demoralization of the two camps of the masses, distinguishes itself by its much greater stability.
And this, I think, adds contexts to the statement in this thread:
Pioccolo wrote: I personally don't think class collaboration is really possible in the long run for the same reasons why social democracy is ultimately untenable. The tension between the interests of workers and capitalists will eventually reach some point where the compromise can no long sustain itself and the government will usually end up stepping in and siding with one side over the other, usually that of capital given its greater financial strength.
There is no actually class collaboration in the Third Position, as much as they'd like it to be so. In virtually every attempt at it, there are classes, they are just supposed to work together for a greater good of the national body. This is not too different from liberal capitalism, in many ways, in that the argument, "Who is going to clean our toilets?" Is often raised as an objection to socialism and an endorsement of a caste system of some kind. This kind of "collaboration," has existed since there has been class itself. It is dressed up and, as you mention, "ultimately untenable," because, "The tension between the interests of workers and capitalists will eventually reach some point where the compromise can no longer sustain itself," and we have what Trotsky speculated above. The same thing that happened to Spain, a fascist area that was left to breathe until its death from within.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!